Beyond the Chess Board: One Mississippi educator reimagines what it means to teach the game
Drawing on 13 years teaching in inner-city Memphis and a decade leading the Franklin Chess Center in Meadville, Mississippi (population 423), Dr. Jeff Bulington, Academic Chair for Mindsets Chess in Education, opened the conference with a powerful question: How do we justify spending school time teaching chess?
When Bulington describes the “justification question,” he’s quick to acknowledge that justification happens on many levels. While much of chess education research focuses on “far transfer”—whether chess improves standardized test scores or general cognitive abilities—Bulington argues this macro-level perspective misses crucial aspects of chess’s educational value.
Knowing How vs. Knowing That
A pivotal moment in Bulington’s teaching career came during a tactics lesson when one of his best students—a player who would later be featured on the CBS News program 60 Minutes—suddenly exclaimed with excitement: “Dr. B, we can use these ideas in our games!”
The comment struck Bulington as both jarring and profound. Of course, students would use tactical patterns in their games—wasn’t that the entire point? Yet the student’s excitement revealed something important: the immediate, practical purpose of chess instruction. Unlike much traditional education where students prepare for distant, abstract tests, chess offers something “just around the horizon where we’re going to use it.”
This observation connects to British philosopher Gilbert Ryle’s distinction between “knowing that” (propositional knowledge) and “knowing how” (practical knowledge). Chess naturally emphasizes the latter, creating a learning environment where application and understanding develop together rather than sequentially.
A Math Teacher’s Awakening
Bulington’s journey into mathematics education began almost accidentally. A humanities major who hadn’t studied math since high school, he accepted a sixth-grade math teaching position in Memphis in 1996. Initially, he taught math the way he’d learned it himself: textbook-oriented, formula-focused, teacher-at-the-front instruction.
Everything changed at a National Council of Teachers of Mathematics conference when, bored in one session, he wandered into another led by Glenda Lappan, the organization’s president. She presented a deceptively simple challenge: How many squares (each the size of a circle’s radius squared) would it take to cover the circle’s surface?
For Bulington, at age 31, this hands-on exploration revealed pi not as an arbitrary number written on a board, but as a geometric relationship—a fundamental truth about circles he could see and manipulate. The experience filled him with both joy and anger: joy at the discovery, anger that he’d never been taught this way as a child.
“It was the kind of experience that made me delighted that I was going to be a math teacher,” Bulington recalls. “It also gave me the sense for the first time that a math class could be as exciting as a chess class.”
Breaking Down Silos: Chess Meets Mathematics
This revelation transformed how Bulington approached both subjects. He began seeing connections between chess thinking and mathematical reasoning that opened new possibilities for curriculum integration.
One powerful example is a game that integrates multiplication with Connect Four. When Bulington introduced this game, chess players immediately employed a strategy their non-chess-playing peers missed—they controlled the center. Why? Because center squares offer more possible combinations for creating four-in-a-row patterns, just as center squares on a chessboard provide more mobility and tactical possibilities.
This represents what Bulington calls “near transfer”—not the far transfer that many chess studies chase, but a genuine application of strategic thinking from one domain to a closely related one. His students wanted to play this game daily, improved at it rapidly, and their math scores rose accordingly.
“Only somebody who was both teaching chess and math is going to see that connection,” Bulington observes. “It’s important for us to have those kinds of conversations with ourselves in terms of the relationship between chess and other matters in school.”
The Larger Challenge: Who Is Ready to Teach Chess?
Bulington poses a sobering question: “Who is really ready to teach chess in schools?” He means this not as a rallying cry but as a genuine challenge to the chess education community.
Creating meaningful connections between chess and core curriculum requires teachers who understand both deeply. It requires time, creativity, and institutional support. Currently, Bulington notes, much of this work emerges from grassroots efforts rather than systematic teacher preparation.
“Where are these teachers? Where are we developing these teachers?” he asks. “We need a different kind of presence in universities and in teacher education programs.”
This challenge extends to how the chess education community conducts research and shares knowledge. Bulington advocates for breaking out of the “chess silo” and engaging with larger educational research organizations like the National Council of Teachers of Mathematics. Chess educators should both learn from and contribute to broader conversations about learning, transfer, and curriculum design.
A Path Forward
Dr. Bulington’s vision for chess education resists simple answers to the justification question. Yes, chess may improve test scores and cognitive abilities—but focusing only on far transfer misses much of what makes chess educationally valuable. The immediate engagement, the practical application of learned concepts, the emotional weight of decisions with consequences—these aspects of chess create learning experiences that justify themselves through their depth and authenticity.
For chess educators, the challenge is not just demonstrating value but developing the pedagogical sophistication to realize chess’s full potential across the curriculum. This requires teachers prepared to see connections, craft meaningful integrations, and understand both chess and academic subjects deeply enough to craft genuine integrations rather than superficial analogies.
Such expertise doesn’t emerge automatically. It requires professional development, collaboration between chess instructors and classroom teachers, and a willingness to move beyond chess as enrichment toward chess as pedagogy. The path forward lies not in producing more studies of distant cognitive transfer, but in building the practical knowledge and teaching capacity to make chess education as thoughtful and substantive as the game itself.
Dr. Jeff Bulington is an educator and chess teacher who founded the Franklin Chess Center in Meadville, Mississippi. His work explores the integration of chess instruction with core academic subjects, particularly mathematics and literature. This article was distilled from his address at the Mindsets Chess in Education Conference which you can view on Youtube.
